Pope revises catechism to say death penalty is 'inadmissible'

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Dacinom said:
In today’s modern society with cameras in jails, cameras everywhere, GPS systems, microchips and state of the art prisons… society is really not at risk of an escape. Therefore the death penalty has no place.
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I don’t think this is true. Just do a search for prisoner killed, prison escapes, etc. I don’t think this should be put forth as a reason that the death penalty is not needed. Families of prisoners, prison guards and people killed by escapees might have a different opinion.
 
KMG said:
What Francis did today has all the hallmarks of distracting from his huge McCarrick and Honduran scandals.
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That’s way off base. These types of things are in the works for months. You can plainly see from the press release that Pope Francis approved this back on May 11—before all this other business. As much as those crises need and deserve attention, that doesn’t mean all other Church business gets put on hold.
 
Still bad timing. Especially what is going to come out from Pennsylvania soon.
 
Then the Church should teach you can have the death penalty and retain your dignity. A martyred individual retains their dignity. What if the death penalty is considered a punishment for worldly actions and not a judgement on the soul in the afterlife? That would then fit with the shift in position on suicide where the person does not got straight to hell for suicide, even Judas, but still has a chance to be redeemed by God?
 
I know of one inmate who was convicted of murdering the daughter of a parishioner. He was also convicted of three other murders of women whom he dated. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. So far he has come up for a parole hearing on three separate occasions.
 
Are you talking about the sexual abuse report? If so, what does that have to do with the death penalty? You can’t get death for sexual abuse or rape.

Or is there something on capital punishment coming out in Pennsylvania?
 
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Joe_5859 said:
I keep seeing this point raised. And I’ll plainly admit that I have no knowledge of third world prison systems. But is this a big issue in third world countries? Do third world countries routinely execute dangerous criminals simply because they have no means of incarcerating them?
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Third world prison systems are awful. In Latin America, prisons are notorious for extreme overcrowding and violence. Inmates live in constant danger of being killed - a contradiction in a region where virtually every country has abolished the death penalty. It’s basically a death sentence just being there.

If there’s no death penalty, there should be higher security for the more violent criminals and appropriate security measures to keep all of the rest in. If they can’t afford that, the death penalty becomes a necessity.
 
So, did he get parole? A lot of times the hearing is a mere formality and the person is no way getting parole. The Manson Family has had many parole hearings.

If the person actually gets parole, it’s often because he is 75 years old and/ or incapacitated from cancer and the state doesn’t want to pay for his care any more and figures he’s not much of a threat being old and sick.
 
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According to the (now-old) Catechism, the reason for the death penalty is not to punish the person but to prevent him from hurting others.
 
The abuse situation. Just my opinion as it might seem a deflection to those outside the Church.
 
Not that wikipedia is the end-all, but it looks like the distribution of abolitionist vs in favor countries parallels that of the first world in terms of reasoning used. Some of the places where capital punishment in 3rd world countries was re-established had as their reasoning the rise of terrorism. So yes, some countries probably do resort to the death penalty to address some drastic societal threats. Others are more like the US or China though, or employ the death penalty for non-murder crimes (see Egypt, for example)…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_by_country#Countries_categorized_as_‘very_high’_on_Human_Development_Index
 
whichwaytogo47 said:
I think its sanctimonious to say that first world countries should remove the death penalty. I don’t think States that have the death penalty are any better/worse morally than States that reject the death penalty. That’s because even with the most secure prisons doesn’t guarantee that a prisoner cannot conspire to commit murder, rape, kidnapping, or torture from inside prison. If you could guarantee that an individual couldn’t commit crimes from inside of prison, than I’d agree that the death penalty would have been a thing of the past. The problem is that prisons are filled with gangs and it’s just not true that life imprisonment is a satisfactory punishment and prevents society from crime being imposed on them from inside the prison.
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Right. I do think in this instance, for first world countries, it would be needed to sector off more violent criminals with higher security. However, I do not think solitary confinement is moral. Something similar to it, but not as harsh.
 
Indeed so why is his dignity a factor when a self defense of society’s concern. Pope Francis makes the grave error assumption that society is now person proof or impervious from harm once a person is put in prison. If a prisoner killed one guard per day while in a high tech prison, what is the punishment for that? How to we square protection of the guards with his dignity?
 
I agree—of all the hills to fight on!

If they were Catholic before, and they looked at the Catechism, they would see that the Catechism, No. 2267, stated the death penalty was licit if it was the only way to protect innocent lives and that such instances were practically non-existent. The position of Pope Francis on this issue is not far from where St. John Paul II was in the 1990s.

2267 Assuming that the guilty party’s identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.

If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm - without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself - the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are very rare, if not practically nonexistent."68
 
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